When I was an undergraduate a long long time ago, I ended up taking a gen-ed “music appreciation” class in my last semester as an undergraduate because I needed credits– any credits– in order to graduate. For whatever reason, it was a class that covered the Baroque era (more or less Bach(s) and such) and then it skipped ahead to the late 19th/early 20th century. It was a ton of fun and I was exposed to a lot of really interesting music that has stuck with me all this time. So when I saw this “Listening to World Music” class on Coursera’s web site, I thought “sure, let’s give that a whirl.”

A blog reader– I think it’s someone who more regularly reads emutalk.org, actually– sent me this link from Forbes.com, “How Duke University Deals With Disruption.” Here’s the first paragraph: “Unless I had a top brand, I would hate to run a college today. Colleges and universities are about to meet their disruptive hour. Websites such as Khan Academy and Udacity now offer free courses that blow away 99% of courses available in traditional colleges.” Oh, please. I think there’s a lot to like about this Coursera/World Music thing. But I want in on whatever drug or delusion or group hallucination these business people are on if they really think that MOOCs are “the answer” to higher education woes and who think that they’re substitute for what’s going on in the real world on college campuses. I bet they can hear colors too.

More after the break.

“Listening to World Music” is a class from Coursera being taught by Carol Muller, who is a music professor at the University of Pennsylvania. We’ve been told that the course has somewhere around 20,000 students.

In signing up and getting involved, I was surprised by the apparatus making it all seem very much like “college.” There was an honor code agreement. There’s a “Course Syllabus” outlining requirements like a regular gen ed, lecture class. The schedule and selected topics are intriguing to me– a week on Paul Simon’s Graceland, one on throat singing, Buena Vista Social Club, etc. There’s a writing assignment the first week– not a particularly good one in my opinion, but I don’t find the assignments any more offensive than what I have seen in other lecture hall classes. In fact, this is set up to be very much like any other lecture hall “music appreciation” class, including the one I took about 25 years ago.

Muller knows what she’s talking about and she seems like a personable/pleasant enough professor. Her format is straight-up lecture: her talking from some notes with some slides going on in the background, her “week 1″ lecture broken into 10-15 minute chunks. Her talking, one camera, black and white slides. To get to the music examples, you have to leave the video and follow links to YouTube clips, ones that I presume existed before the course began. That’s it. It’s all so simple and mundane on so many different levels. Coursera is supposed to “revolutionize” the way teaching works, and what we have here is a “sage on the stage” and completely non-interactive lecture that has the production values of a small midwestern town’s public access television station. This, this is going to “blow away 99% of classes available at traditional colleges?” Really?

No, this new format clearly borrows heavily on an older, pre-Internets one called “television,” though this doesn’t come close to the production values of most television designed to teach you something– I’m thinking of shows about gardening, cooking, home improvement, interior design, etc. And I have a feeling that Muller’s ongoing “connection” with anything else in the class is going to remain as remote as if we were all watching a television show.

To be fair, there are at least quizes that pop up after the video is done. The first one took me by surprise because I was only half paying attention. Luckily, it wasn’t that hard of a quiz.

There are also some videos of graduate assistants/teaching fellows for the class. Again, in a public access studio somehow connected to UPenn, these young people energetically and with apparently no script give us as students tips on how to discuss the course. There’s even a “small group” of grad students modeling what would be the ideal sort of discussion we should be having about these lectures and music– though it’d be a hard conversation to imitate since they obviously know a lot more about music than the most of the students and their conversation is taking place inperson and our discussion takes place online.

Speaking of which: the discussion interface is okay, or at least it isn’t as shitty as the Blackboard interface that hosted Curt Bonk’s quasi-MOOC. For example, it is at least possible to sort by last updated, popularity, topic, etc. There’s also a notification feature I like: I posted a comment on one thread, and now I get an email whenever someone posts to that thread, too. The other thing that’s kind of nice about the discussion forums is because of the international reach of the class, we’re getting a lot of other suggestions for “World Music.” Basically, it was people posting from all over the place with links (mostly to YouTube) saying “hey, listen to this.” Of course, I’ve lost track of where that thread is now on the course web site.

But like the Bonk MOOC and other MOOCs, the impossible size of the class means that the “discussion” is mostly noise, and really a “white noise” in that it might as well be just static playing in the background.

One thing I’m curious to see emerge next week is the “crowd sourcing” evaluation/peer review of the writing assignment. We were given a choice of prompts to respond to with three or so paragraphs. This is an ongoing, “weekly” writing activity, and it is a good example of the problem of trying to shoehorn a traditional lecture hall kind of class into a 20,000 student and International MOOC. Originally, the due dates for each of these weekly activities was going to be Friday, but as literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of the students pointed out, most participants in this thing don’t have that sort of “Monday to Friday” weekly schedule of the typical UPenn student. Go figure.

Anyway, I wrote up a couple quick paragraphs and posted it. The next step, which I assume happens next week, is there is going to be some kind of peer evaluation where I’ll be asked review someone else’s work (and someone else will review mine, and so on) based on this rubric (PDF), and then (again, we’ll see) the teaching assistants will read and comment on the most recommended responses.

So, it’s interesting and I think it’s a chance for me to learn something about World Music, but I don’t think it’s “Educational” in the sense that there is a lot of teaching going on or any credible way for me as a student to be evaluated. It feels a lot more like I’m intensely watching a cooking show rather than taking a class. And don’t get me wrong about the cooking show analogy: I like the Food Network (less now than when they had a lot more shows that actually focused on cooking techniques) and similar kinds of things, and I do learn a lot from those shows that helps me in my own cooking. But are cooking shows going to replace culinary schools? I kinda doubt it.

What a great post, Steve – it matches up in a lot of ways with what I am experiencing at the Coursera Fantasy-SciFi course, which I am blogging about here: http://courserafantasy.blogspot.com/ – it feels more like a book club than a class since, just as you say about the music class, there is not really a lot of teaching going on, which seems unfortunate. This is a topic people are passionate about, but they are not especially well-informed, and the professor could be making a big difference I think by posting links, recommending books, responding to some key posts at the discussion board. I will confess to being both studentish and also teacherly in my interactions with people; I have a studentish enthusiasm for this (I love the idea of being a student in an internet environment – what a treat for me! I was often bored/frustrated in classrooms), but also a teacherly concern for people who do seem lost in the material and not sure where to go for ideas and guidance.
Discussion boards: driving me BONKERS. A rant about that here: https://plus.google.com/111474406259561102151/posts/hFtYGhdRFAU – yes, the discussion board is slightly less horrible than Blackboard Course Sites, but not by much… mostly I am interacting with people via Google+, Twitter and in blogs since the discussion board is such a nightmare.
Anyway, thanks for your post and I enjoyed also the series of posts on MOOCs leading up to this. Definitely very much worth pondering from all angles and I’m committed to staying in this course for the duration (I love the subject matter) so that I can provide a well-informed opinion about one MOOC at least. :-)

I’m taking the world music course from Coursera as well, and I agree pretty much with everything you’ve written here. The white noise is close to overwhelming; I’m still trying to figure out, rhetorically, what is going on and how this all will play out. I wish the music were as loud as the noise is.

[…] MOOCs over the last few days that I finally sort of lost track. One of them, though, actually made the MOOC – cookery connection, in terms of the food culture that’s emerged in the U.S. over the past 10 or 15 years. […]

[…] their courses. I enrolled in World Music and blogged about it in some detail from beginning to end, starting here and kind of ending here, though I am still writing and thinking about it. I don’t want to go […]

I'm a writer and a professor at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan. You can learn more than you want to learn about me by clicking on "about." You can contact me by sending email to skrause at emich dot edu.